Mizel Museum acquires Lowenstein collection

Long before Henry Lowenstein became known as Denver’s most prominent theater producer, he was a child of the kindertransport. Now the theater legend has has gifted his personal documents from World War II to the Mizel Museum at 400 S. Kearney St.

These documents detail his family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust.

“I think the Mizel Museum is the right place for my collection of papers relating to my family and my parents’ miraculous survival in Berlin during World War II,” he said. “Museums carry a special responsibility to continue to explain and tell about one of the darkest chapters in human history.”

Included in the collection are postcards from the Theresienstadt ghetto, the Lowenstein family’s deportation notice, and documents regarding the kindertransport.

Born in Berlin in 1925, Lowenstein fled the Nazis in 1939 on the kindertransport, which rescued 10,000 young refugees from the quickly deteriorating situation in Germany. Upon arrival in England, Lowenstein worked his way through the war on a farm and made his way to America in 1947. His mother, father, and sister all survived the war and also immigrated to America in the postwar years. He spent three years as an illustrator in the U.S. Air Force and then applied to Yale’s graduate school to study theatrical design. Lowenstein applied to Yale graduate school with no undergraduate degree, no U.S. citizenship, and only one piece of theatrical artwork in his portfolio, he was admitted on a leap of faith. Upon graduation from Yale, Lowenstein moved to Denver at the request of Denver philanthropist, Helen Bonfils.

Lowenstein came to Denver in 1956 to work at the the Bonfils Theatre on East Colfax Avenue, which was later renamed the Lowenstein Theatre.

The Mizel Museum hopes the acquisition will help educate the public about the Holocaust by engaging them with a local survivor’s story and objects. The Mizel Museum’s forthcoming permanent exhibition, “4000 Year Road Trip: Gathering Sparks,” will feature aspects of Lowenstein’s collection within the exhibit. The exhibit is currently in development and is set to open in summer 2010.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.